


Flickering lamps, unmoored on the sea

by laughingpineapple



Category: The Witness (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, The whole structural interconnection of the thing or something
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-13
Updated: 2019-09-13
Packaged: 2020-10-17 22:08:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,286
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20628299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laughingpineapple/pseuds/laughingpineapple
Summary: All men are the island.





	Flickering lamps, unmoored on the sea

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Gammarad](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gammarad/gifts).

> THANK YOU for requesting The Witness, it's the best thing that could happen in this exchange! I hope this cuts close to what you wanted. I mostly based it on the first ending, the second video (the one about hierarchies of ideas), the audio logs and what the game means to me.  
Aside from the unnamed first visitor, as per your letter, when I needed OCs I did pick them from a fandom but it's a stealth crossover that is meant to work even without knowing who they are. Just a bunch of people whose concerns resonated with certain areas. It's a... closely related fandom, anyway!

She had no name when she came to the island: this happened before names, before the world was split and cut and catalogued. The waves carried her body across the dark sea, and she dreamt long and poignant dreams under the water; when she woke up again, she was lying on the fresh sands of the island, in a bay that contained the possibility of a village but still lay bare, content with growing grass and jagged dark rocks (this happened before villages, as well).

Small stones smoothed by the sea tickled her legs; the waves that pushed them to and fro seemed tame and friendly, almost curious to touch the newcomer, to bid her welcome. A far cry from the storm that still roared in her ears when she closed her eyes. 

She set her back to the sea and walked, and walked, and walked. In her travels across the pristine expanses of the island, she saw the brilliance of the rising sun touching the side of the mountain, which was one and the same as the sparkling trail of ice of the frozen river that seemed to spring from it. She saw hidden paths forming on the water's edge as the sea met the land. She saw the sky flow through the gaps in the tree tops as if it were a river, which was only fair as she had seen a river become sunlight. 

All that she saw in this land, she traced with her hand stretched out in front of her, fingers reaching out to the sky and the sea. As she traced these paths, she defined them, she made them real, with the same unwavering conviction which, before the island, had led her to dip her hands in the mud and trace her figures on the walls of a cave. _ I am here _ , she had said with those paintings _ . I see this. _This too she commits to a greater memory than her own, which is not the wall of a cave but a certain quality of the air of this place, which seems to hold her thoughts and resonate with them, and shine with new possibilities. So she traces her paths like magic and through them she says: the world is a whole.

It will take time before others will see these truths again: they will have words for rivers big and small and for the sky, and they will look at the air and find nitrogen and oxygen and carbon dioxide, objectively distinct, like particles of a material grammar, and they will break them down even further.

But condensed vapour fills the rivers and after a spell it rises up again from the water's surface, back to the air whence it came. They will come to see that the flickering of a candle is, at its heart, a jiggling of atoms, the same force that, many light years and several degrees of complexity further down, explodes in the heart of stars. In due time. For the time being, in this time before any names at all, her paths were traced and there they shone, fixed like constellations, waiting for discerning eyes which would recognise them. 

Her bones rest within the island, deep underground, touching, from a certain perspective, a vein of white limestone that stretches like a ribcage holding the island.

So

When Caroline and Cecil came to the island, and sat on the grass in a field dotted with apple trees, and wondered how much labor it would take to be able to call it an orchard, and how much this intervention would push these plants away from their natural branches among a tree of infinite possibilities, and both of them were intimately talking about people rather than trees, about people scattered like trees

And when Anna came to the island, following its dunes with her eyes attuned to the desert, a dream of home, until those dunes ended and she found herself very small and very alone at the base of a cliff of blinding white marble, and so losing herself within it she found a thought which had already sublimated in that place, that is, that carving is working by subtraction, and so she lent herself to the stone and found the figures hidden within the marble, but even after she freed them they could not shake the suffering of their solitude, each of them forever separate, and she thought she may have lent too much of herself to the stone

When a man who hid his name from the surface came to the island, he was fascinated by the ruins of the sun temple which by then had been long built and abandoned, but as he considered that place he kept looking at the sea; he was fascinated by the few houses which had gathered forming a small village, but as he considered that place he kept looking at the sea. In the end he built a boat to follow his restless instinct to reach beyond the borders of the island and find the lands, the people, the knowledge that lay beyond the horizon. The man was a scholar and a polymath but a sailor he was not, and so his boat broke in half by the shore, leaving him stranded, comforted by the lapping waves, as the alien stars above him called to him (he named a few of them and they were not so alien anymore)

When Catherine came to the island, she knew that she had followed an ancient route there through a dream within a dream, so far away from her self that she had reached the waters of a deep collective sea, and filled with that knowledge she sat upon a cliff, observing the rocks that rose above the waters and their reflections on the surface, immaterial image mirroring the material objects. She looked at her own standing immaterial dream as the mirror of an unknown material reality, attempting to trace its contours, but found them vast and measureless, and lost herself in sweet unknowability

When her distant daughter came to the island, she followed her same path there, but her journey was arduous and meandering, coasting roaring otherworldly abysses. In the end, she sat near to where her mother had stood, on an sunny red bay rich in loam. For her symmetries, she dug her hands deep in the clay, searching for herself within crude matter. Could one's offspring be an item, a vase, a place instead of a child, what would reflect her after all was said and done?

When Richard came to the island, he was long accustomed to humility and darkness, and to history dragging him further and further downwards toward a bottomless pit. He found a place of shadows there, where he could feel at home, and saw that it was a sacred place, dominated by an ancient tree, whose many branches also looked sacred enough to his eyes. The shadows cast by its growing branches entwined with the walls and breaches in those ancient ruins drew ordered paths on the ground in the present, elegant paths, beautiful, and he dared to hope

And when Arthur and Albert and Werner and Nicholas and Augustine and Hans and Yung-chia and Hugh and David and Ryonen and William and Douglas and Rabindranath and Gangaji and Rupert and Muhammad and Zhuangzhi and Lao-tzu and Sahib and Russell and Paul and James and many, many others came to the island, 

they all left their footsteps, all led, all followed, their efforts interconnected and forming so many echoing paths, all leading to and from that first spark of recognition, standing on the shoulders of that first witness, resting on her bones.


End file.
